New Family Wealth Toolkit Helps Families Maximize More Than Wealth

The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit is a new must-have book and online resource for families and financial planners to maximize financial capital, human capital and social capital. Read full release here.

New York, NY (January 2013) – Family wealth management means more than managing dollars. Maximizing wealth, family member capabilities, and addressing life fulfillment is a combined and sustainable approach that leading family-enterprise experts and authors Fredda Herz Brown and Fran Lotery unveil in their new The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit. The recent release from Wiley Finance bridges generations, and facilitates family wealth sustainability with an applied-learning approach.

The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit is more than just a book, it is a hands on assessment of individual family enterprises using theory with applications. Families and financial planners will learn from the experts using the handbook and have the additional value of the online resource for families to analyze themselves and acquire a healthy methodological foundation in order to successfully navigate complex and ever changing currents. Access to the online index comes with the handbook or can be purchased alone on the book website www.familywealthsustainability.com.

Dr. Fredda Brown, Co-author says “To be sustainable, families must look more broadly at wealth. Our Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit helps families ‘learn by doing’ using a framework which includes structural development, decision-making processes and cross-generational leadership strategy. With our toolkit, family enterprises can learn how to meet current capital needs of present family members, while ensuring sufficient resources for future generations, and subsequently how each branch of the family and successive generations together can make wise decisions.”

For nearly two decades, Herz Brown has studied and assisted generational transitions within successful families. Now a guest lecturer in the Columbia University MBA program, her research began at the Family Institute of Westchester; a postgraduate training center in family systems work, which she co-founded.

Dr. Fran Lotery, Co-author says that “Families cannot look myopically at money alone. We created a handbook and online resource to empower families and their advisors with both theoretical best practices, and hands-on management technology. Our handbook and online resource bridges the generations, and also facilitates leadership of wealth. Human and social capital is addressed along with financial capital, including the positive reasons for continuing to remain together, and share assets. It addresses how the shaping of the family legacy allows each generation to contribute, and what is required of the next generation to effectively lead into the future, also how to meet current capital needs of family members that ensures sufficient resources for future generations; and how each branch, generation and family as a whole make decisions.”

Fran Lotery began her diverse career as a therapist and as an adjunct professor teaching family dynamics. Lotery has more than thirty years’ experience and knowledge in family economic and emotional systems gained from work with professional firms, family enterprises, owners of closely-held companies, and large nonprofit institutions.

Drs. Fredda Herz Brown and Fran Lotery are each pioneers in the family-enterprise field. Together in 2006, Herz Brown, Lotery, and others formed Relative Solutions, a leading firm which helps multigenerational family enterprises manage the decisions related to their shared assets.

Lotery says, “Families are looking for new approaches to working positively together to manage change and to reach their aspirations and goals. Our Toolkit bridges the generations by improving the knowledge and resources available to them.” According to Fredda Herz Brown, “Enterprising families are made up of individuals who are interconnected in distinctive and complex ways. Their sharing of financial assets raises the potential for facing many risks, opportunities, and challenges together.”

The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit by Fredda Herz Brown and Fran Lotery was officially released November 2012 and is available at Amazon.com and Wiley Publishing. Access to the online index is added value with every handbook. The online index can also be purchased separately at www.familywealthsustainability.com.

About The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit

The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit is an interactive assessment tool and companion manual for wealthy families and their financial advisors that analyze the behaviors and knowledge that impact a family’s overall wealth, while also providing best practices needed for improvement. One part assessment software tool and one part companion book, the online Index allows readers to assess their family enterprise across four dimensions of sustainability, while the Manual acts both as a roadmap to analyzing their results and provides a foundation in best practices.

About Relative Solutions, LLC.

Relative Solutions is a firm that manages change within families as they transition their wealth from generation to generation. It was founded by leading family-enterprise experts and authors Fredda Herz Brown and Fran Lotery, authors of The Family Wealth Sustainability Toolkit. Whether they are working with a family on the meaning and impact of wealth, or on issues of governance, strategic planning and philanthropy, Relative Solutions helps families to achieve their stated goals. To learn more visit: www.Relative-Solutions.com